Double-Talking Obama White House Owns Sequester

President Barack Obama speaks about the sequester, Tuesday, Feb. 19, 2013, at the South Court Auditorium in the Eisenhower Executive Office building... View Enlarged Image

The automatic spending cuts poised to hit the federal government are brought to you not by the Republican Party, but by none other than the Obama White House.

Listening to President Obama on Tuesday, you would think the sequester was something his immediate predecessor George W. Bush forced him to "inherit" — like so much else the president refuses to own.

The president claims Republicans must either compromise or be "willing to put hundreds of thousands of jobs and our entire economy at risk just to protect a few special interest tax loopholes that benefit only the wealthiest Americans and biggest corporations."

And "tens of thousands of parents will have to scramble to find child care for their kids."

In other words, that asteroid that missed the earth last week will turn around and cause Armageddon after all, courtesy of Republicans enthralled to their "ideological goals."

On Wednesday, White House mouthpiece Jay Carney was forced to admit it was all balderdash, that "No," the sequester would not destroy "hundreds of thousands" of Americans jobs, as Obama claimed, "but there will be job losses."

There certainly will. This, after all, is the Obama Economy.

After four years in office, President Obama has found a new way to disown his economic misdeeds. Before, it was Bush's fault; now it's the fault of the "Republican Sequester."

You wouldn't think from any of this, would you, that on Tuesday that very same Jay Carney admitted that the sequester "was an idea that the White House put forward."

You wouldn't think a Senate under Democratic control passed it.

And you wouldn't think that during the third presidential debate, after Mitt Romney warned of the damage to defense of sequestration cuts, Obama assured the nation that the sequester "will not happen."

As the Washington Post's Bob Woodward, whose latest book, "The Price of Politics," examines the 2011 budget negotiations, told Politico the day after that debate gaffe, "What the president said is not correct. He's mistaken. And it's refuted by the people who work for him."

Woodward pointed out that "The idea was to design something .. . so onerous that no one would ever let it happen."

Woodward added, "They all believed that the supercommittee was going to come up with a $1.2 trillion deficit-reduction plan, so there would be no sequestration. Of course, the supercommittee failed and so the trigger went off, which has all of these very Draconian cuts."

See Also

Politics: The White House has denounced an anti-abortion group's videos of Planned Parenthood's activities as "fraudulent" and circled its wagons to defend the indefensible. What kind of White House is this?For an institution that might argue that it doesn't have a dog in this fight, the White ...

Iran Deal: After initially refusing, the United Nations' International Atomic Energy Agency will brief senators Wednesday. Are its nuclear monitoring practices kept secret because they're inadequate?Yukiya Amano, the director general of the IAEA, until Friday was refusing to brief senators on ...

Corruption: The third installment of released emails fell hard Friday on the Hillary Clinton campaign. If her candidacy lasts until the end of the summer, there's much more wrong with this country than we thought.Friday had to be an extraordinarily trying day for the Democratic front-runner. On the ...

Regulation: As businesses struggle to stay open and lay off workers, the Environmental Protection Agency is preparing one of the biggest hiring binges in America outside of Google. Good news? Hardly.Barack Obama's EPA has announced it will try to hire 800 new regulators over the next several ...

Taxes Vs. Prosperity: The Real Wedge Issue Ronald Reagan died 11 years ago, and his presidency ended a quarter century ago. But my, how his tax-cutting ideas live on. The living legacy of Reaganomics, or supply-side economics, is that tax rates keep falling all over the world. Imitation really is ...

About Investor's Business Daily

Investor’s Business Daily provides exclusive stock lists, investing data, stock market research, education and the latest financial and business news to help investors make more money in the stock market. All of IBD’s products and features are based on the CAN SLIM® Investing System developed by IBD’s Founder William J. O’Neil, who identified the seven common characteristics that winning stocks display before making huge price gains. Each letter of CAN SLIM represents one of those traits.

Select market data is provided by Interactive Data Corp. Real Time Services. Price and Volume data is delayed 20 minutes unless otherwise noted, is believed accurate but is not warranted or guaranteed by Interactive Data Corp. Real Time Services and is subject to Interactive Data Corp. Real Time Services terms. All times are Eastern United States. *Reflects real-time index prices.